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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Endpaper Photographs
Preface
Becoming Me
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Becoming Us
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Photograph Insert
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Becoming More
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Photograph Credits
Landmarks
Cover
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Start
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24
In the spring of 2015, Malia announced that she’d been invited to the prom by a boy
she kind of liked. She was sixteen then, finishing her junior year at Sidwell. To
us, she was still our kid, long-legged and enthusiastic as she’d always been, though
every day she seemed to become a little more adult. She was now nearly as tall as
I was and starting to think about applying to college. She was a good student, curious
and self-possessed, a collector of details much like her dad. She’d become fascinated
by films and filmmaking and the previous summer had taken it upon herself to seek
out Steven Spielberg one evening when he’d come to the White House for a dinner party,
asking him so many questions that he followed up with an offer to let her intern on
a TV series he was producing. Our girl was finding her way.
Normally, for security reasons, Malia and Sasha weren’t allowed to ride in anyone
else’s car. Malia had a provisional license by then and was able to drive herself
around town, though always with agents following in their own vehicle. But still,
since moving to Washington at the age of ten, she’d never once ridden a bus or the
Metro or been driven by someone who didn’t work for the Secret Service. For prom night,
though, we were making an exception.
On the appointed evening, her date arrived in his car, clearing security at the southeast
gate of the White House, following the path up and around the South Lawn by which
heads of state and other visiting dignitaries normally arrived, and then gamely—bravely—walking
into the Dip Room dressed in a black suit.
“Just be cool please, okay?” Malia had said to me and Barack, her embarrassment already
beginning to smolder as we rode the elevator downstairs. I was barefoot, and Barack
was in flip-flops. Malia wore a long black skirt and an elegant bare-shouldered top.
She looked beautiful and about twenty-three years old.
By my reckoning, we did manage to play it cool, though Malia still laughs, remembering
it all as a bit excruciating. Barack and I shook the young man’s hand, snapped a few
pictures, and gave our daughter a hug before sending them on their way. We took what
was perhaps unfair comfort in the knowledge that Malia’s security detail would basically
ride the boy’s bumper all the way to the restaurant where they were going for dinner
before the dance and would remain on quiet duty throughout the night.
From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers—knowing that
a set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with extricating them
from any sort of emergency. From a teenager’s standpoint, though, this was understandably
a complete and total drag. As with many aspects of life in the White House, we were
left to sort out what it meant for our family—where and how to draw the lines, how
to balance the requirements of the presidency against the needs of two kids learning
how to mature on their own.
Once they got to high school, we gave the girls curfews—first 11:00 and eventually
midnight—and enforced them, according to Malia and Sasha, with more vigor than many
of their friends’ parents did. If I was concerned about their safety or whereabouts,
I could always check in with the agents, but I tried not to. It was important to me
that the kids trusted their security team. Instead, I did what I think a lot of parents
do and relied on a network of other parents for information, all of us pooling what
we knew about where the flock of them was going and whether there’d be an adult in
charge. Of course, our girls carried extra responsibility by virtue of who their father
was, knowing that their screwups could make headlines. Barack and I both recognized
how unfair this was. Both of us had pushed boundaries and done dumb things as teenagers,
and we’d been fortunate to do it all without the eyes of a nation on us.
Malia had been eight when Barack sat on the edge of her bed in Chicago and asked if
she thought it was okay for him to run for president. I think now of how little she’d
known at the time, how little any of us could have known. It meant one thing to be
a child in the White House. It meant something different to try to emerge from it
as an adult. How could Malia have guessed that she’d have men with guns following
her to prom someday? Or that people would take photos of her sneaking a cigarette
and sell them to gossipy websites?
Our kids were coming of age during what felt like a unique time. Apple had begun selling
the iPhone in June 2007, about four months after Barack announced his candidacy for
president. A million of them sold in less than three months. A billion of them sold
before his second term was over. His was the first presidency of a new era, one involving
the disruption and dismantling of all norms around privacy—involving selfies, data
hacks, Snapchats, and Kardashians. Our daughters lived more deeply inside it than
we did, in part because social media governed teen life and in part because their
routines put them in closer contact with the public than ours did. As Malia and Sasha
moved around Washington with their friends after school or on weekends, they’d catch
sight of strangers pointing their phones in their direction, or contend with grown
men and women asking—even demanding—to take a selfie with them. “You do know that
I’m a child, right?” Malia would sometimes say when turning someone down.
Barack and I did what we could to protect our kids from too much exposure, declining
all media requests for them and working to keep their everyday lives largely out of
sight. Their Secret Service escorts supported us by trying to be less conspicuous
when following the girls around in public, wearing board shorts and T-shirts instead
of suits and swapping their earpieces and wrist microphones for earbud headsets, in
order to better blend in at the teenage hangouts they now frequented. We strongly
disapproved of the publication of any photos of our children that weren’t connected
to an official event, and the White House press office made this clear to the media.
Melissa and others on my team became my enforcers anytime an image of one of the girls
surfaced on a gossip site, making haranguing phone calls to get it taken down.
Guarding the girls’ privacy meant finding other ways to satiate the public’s curiosity
about our family. Early in Barack’s second term, we’d added a new puppy to the household—Sunny—a
free-spirited rambler who seemed to see no point in being house-trained, given how
big her new house was. The dogs added a lightness to everything. They were living,
loafing proof that the White House was a home. Knowing that Malia and Sasha were basically
off-limits, the White House communications teams began requesting the dogs for official
appearances. In the evenings, I’d find memos in my briefing book asking me to approve
a “Bo and Sunny Drop-By,” allowing the dogs to mingle with members of the media or
children coming for a tour. The dogs would get deployed when reporters came to learn
about the importance of American trade and exports or, later, to hear Barack speak
in favor of Merrick Garland, his pick for the Supreme Court. Bo starred in a promotional
video for the Easter Egg Roll. He and Sunny posed with me for photos in an online
campaign to urge people to sign up for health-care coverage. They made excellent ambassadors,
impervious to criticism and unaware of their own fame.
Like all kids, Sasha and Malia outgrew things over time. Since the first year of Barack’s
presidency, they had joined him in front of reporters each fall while he performed
what had to be the most ridiculous ritual of the office—pardoning a live turkey just
ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. For the first five years, they’d smiled and giggled
as their dad cracked corny jokes. But by the sixth year, at thirteen and sixteen,
they were too old to even pretend it was funny. Within hours of the ceremony, photos
of the two of them looking aggrieved appeared all over the internet—Sasha stone-faced,
Malia with her arms crossed—as they stood next to the president, his lectern, and
the oblivious turkey. A USA Today headline summed it up fairly enough: “Malia and Sasha Obama Are So Done with Their
Dad’s Turkey Pardon.”
Their attendance at the pardon, as well as at virtually every White House event, became
entirely optional. These were happy, well-adjusted teens with lives that were accordingly
rich with activities and social intrigue having nothing to do with their parents.
As a parent, you’re only sort of in control, anyway. Our kids had their own agendas,
which left them less impressed with even the more fun parts of ours.
“Don’t you want to come downstairs tonight and hear Paul McCartney play?”
“Mom, please. No.”
There was often music blasting from Malia’s room. Sasha and her friends had taken
a shine to cable cooking shows and sometimes commandeered the residence kitchen to
decorate cookies or whip up elaborate, multicourse meals for themselves. Both our
daughters relished the relative anonymity they enjoyed when going on school trips
or joining friends’ families for vacations (their agents always in tow). Sasha loved
nothing more than to pick out her own snacks at Dulles International Airport before
boarding a packed commercial flight, for the simple fact that it was so different
from the presidential rigmarole that went on at Andrews Air Force Base and had become
our family’s norm.
Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our
girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and
visit the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness.
But it could also be a pain in the neck, especially when we were trying to tend to
things unrelated to the presidency. Earlier in Malia’s junior year, the two of us
had gone to spend a day visiting colleges in New York City, for instance, setting
up tours at New York University and Columbia. It had worked fine for a while. We’d
moved through NYU’s campus at a brisk pace, our efficiency aided by the fact that
it was still early and many students were not yet up for the day. We’d checked out
classrooms, poked our heads into a dorm room, and chatted with a dean before heading
uptown to grab an early lunch and move on to the next tour.
The problem is that there’s no hiding a First Lady–sized motorcade, especially on
the island of Manhattan in the middle of a weekday. By the time we finished eating,
about a hundred people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the commotion
only breeding more commotion. We stepped out to find dozens of cell phones hoisted
in our direction as we were engulfed by a chorus of cheers. It was beneficent, this
attention—“Come to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting—but it was not especially
useful for a girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future.
I knew immediately what I needed to do, and that was to bench myself—to let Malia
go see the next campus without me, sending Kristin Jones, my personal assistant, as
her escort instead. Without me there, Malia’s odds of being recognized went down.
She could move faster and with a lot fewer agents. Without me, she could maybe, possibly,
look like just another kid walking the quad. I at least owed her a shot at that.
Kristin, in her late twenties and a California native, was like a big sister to both
my girls anyway. She’d come to my office as a young intern, and along with Kristen
Jarvis, who until recently had been my trip director, was instrumental in our family’s
life, filling some of these strange gaps caused by the intensity of our schedules
and the hindering nature of our fame. “The Kristins,” as we called them, stood in
for us often. They served as liaisons between our family and Sidwell, setting up meetings
and interacting with teachers, coaches, and other parents when Barack and I weren’t
able. With the girls, they were protective, loving, and far hipper than I’d ever be
in the eyes of my kids. Malia and Sasha trusted them implicitly, seeking their counsel
on everything from wardrobe and social media to the increasing proximity of boys.
While Malia toured Columbia that afternoon, I was put into a secure holding area designated
by the Secret Service—what turned out to be the basement of an academic building on
campus—where I sat alone and unnoticed until it was time to leave, wishing I’d at
least brought a book to read. It hurt a little to be down there, I’ll admit. I felt
a kind of loneliness that probably had less to do with the fact that I was by myself
killing time in a windowless room and more to do with the idea that, like it or not,
the future was coming, that our first baby was going to grow up and leave.
We weren’t at the end yet, but already I was beginning to take stock. I found myself
tallying the gains and losses, what had been sacrificed and what we could count as
progress—in our country, in our family. Had we done all we could? Were we going to
come out of this intact?
I tried to think back and remember how it was that my life had forked away from the
predictable, control-freak fantasy existence I’d envisioned for myself—the one with
the steady salary, a house to live in forever, a routine to my days. At what point
had I chosen away from that? When had I allowed the chaos inside? Had it been on the
summer night when I lowered my ice cream cone and leaned in to kiss Barack for the
first time? Was it the day I’d finally walked away from my orderly piles of documents
and my partner-track career in law, convinced I’d find something more fulfilling?
My mind sometimes landed back in the church basement in Roseland, on the Far South
Side of Chicago, where I’d gone twenty-five years earlier to be with Barack as he
spoke to a neighborhood group that was struggling to push back against hopelessness
and indifference. Listening to the conversation that evening, I’d heard something
familiar articulated in a new way. It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes
at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.
It was what I’d done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family—and marginalized people
more generally—had always done. You got somewhere by building that better reality,
if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live
in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
I’d known the guy for only a couple of months then, but in retrospect I see now that
this was my swerve. In that moment, without saying a word, I’d signed on for a lifetime
of us, and a lifetime of this.
All these years later, I was thankful for the progress I saw. In 2015, I was still
making visits to Walter Reed, but each time it seemed there were fewer wounded warriors
to visit. The United States had fewer service members at risk overseas, fewer injuries
needing care, fewer mothers with their hearts broken. This, to me, was progress.
Progress was the Centers for Disease Control reporting that childhood obesity rates
appeared to be leveling off, particularly among children ages two to five. It was
two thousand high school students in Detroit showing up to help me celebrate College
Signing Day, a holiday we’d helped expand as a part of Reach Higher, to mark the day
when young people committed to their colleges. Progress was the Supreme Court’s decision
to reject a challenge to a key part of the country’s new health-care law, all but
ensuring that Barack’s signature domestic achievement—the security of health insurance
for every American—would remain strong and intact once he left office. It was an economy
that had been hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month when Barack entered the White House
having now racked up nearly five straight years of continuous job growth.
I took this all in as evidence that as a country we were capable of building a better
reality. But still, we lived in the world as it is.
A year and a half after Newtown, Congress had passed not a single gun-control measure.
Bin Laden was gone, but ISIS had arrived. The homicide rate in Chicago was going up
rather than down. A black teen named Michael Brown was shot by a cop in Ferguson,
Missouri, his body left in the middle of the road for hours. A black teen named Laquan
McDonald was shot sixteen times by police in Chicago, including nine times in the
back. A black boy named Tamir Rice was shot dead by police in Cleveland while playing
with a toy gun. A black man named Freddie Gray died after being neglected in police
custody in Baltimore. A black man named Eric Garner was killed by police after being
put in a choke hold during his arrest on Staten Island. All this was evidence of something
pernicious and unchanging in America. When Barack was first elected, various commentators
had naively declared that our country was entering a “postracial” era, in which skin
color would no longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans
obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism
that were tearing our nation apart.
Late in June 2015, Barack and I flew to Charleston, South Carolina, to sit with another
grieving community—this time at the funeral of a pastor named Clementa Pinckney, who
had been one of nine people killed in a racially motivated shooting earlier in the
month at an African Methodist Episcopal church known simply as Mother Emanuel. The
victims, all African Americans, had welcomed an unemployed twenty-one-year-old white
man—a stranger to them all—into their Bible study group. He’d sat with them for a
while; then, after the group bowed their heads in prayer, he stood up and began shooting.
In the middle of it, he was reported to have said, “I have to do this, because you
rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”
After delivering a moving eulogy for Reverend Pinckney and acknowledging the deep
tragedy of the moment, Barack surprised everyone by leading the congregation in a
slow and soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was a simple invocation of hope,
a call to persist. Everyone in the room, it seemed, joined in. For more than six years
now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation.
As minorities across the country were gradually beginning to take on more significant
roles in politics, business, and entertainment, our family had become the most prominent
example. Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans,
but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others.
The hatred was old and deep and as dangerous as ever.
We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on,
as gracefully as we could.
The same day as the funeral service in Charleston—June 26, 2015—the Supreme Court
of the United States issued a landmark decision, affirming that same-sex couples had
the right to marry in all fifty states. This was the culmination of a legal battle
that had been fought methodically over decades, state by state, court by court, and
as with any civil rights struggle it had required the persistence and courage of many
people. On and off over the course of the day, I’d caught reports of Americans overjoyed
by the news. A jubilant crowd chanted, “Love has won!” on the steps of the Supreme
Court. Couples were flocking to city halls and county courthouses to exercise what
was now a constitutional right. Gay bars were opening early. Rainbow flags waved on
street corners around the country.
All this had helped buoy us through a sad day in South Carolina. Returning home to
the White House, we’d changed out of our funeral clothes, had a quick dinner with
the girls, and then Barack had disappeared into the Treaty Room to flip on ESPN and
catch up on work. I was heading to my dressing room when I caught sight of a purplish
glow through one of the north-facing windows of the residence, at which point I remembered
that our staff had planned to illuminate the White House in the rainbow colors of
the pride flag.
Looking out the window, I saw that beyond the gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, a big
crowd of people had gathered in the summer dusk to see the lights. The north drive
was filled with government staff who’d stayed late to see the White House transformed
in celebration of marriage equality. The decision had touched so many people. From
where I stood, I could see the exuberance, but I could hear nothing. It was an odd
part of our reality. The White House was a silent, sealed fortress, almost all sound
blocked by the thickness of its windows and walls. The Marine One helicopter could
land on one side of the house, its rotor blades kicking up gale-force winds and slamming
tree branches, but inside the residence we’d hear nothing. I usually figured out that
Barack had arrived home from a trip not by the sound of his helicopter but rather
by the smell of its fuel, which somehow managed to permeate.
Oftentimes, I was happy to withdraw into the protected hush of the residence at the
end of a long day. But this night felt different, as paradoxical as the country itself.
After a day spent grieving in Charleston, I was looking at a giant party starting
just outside my window. Hundreds of people were staring up at our house. I wanted
to see it the way they did. I found myself suddenly desperate to join the celebration.
I stuck my head into the Treaty Room. “You want to go out and look at the lights?”
I asked Barack. “There are tons of people out there.”
He laughed. “You know I can’t do tons of people.”
Sasha was in her room, engrossed in her iPad. “You want to go see the rainbow lights
with me?” I asked.
“Nope.”
This left Malia, who surprised me a little by immediately signing on. I’d found my
wing-woman. We were going on an adventure—outside, where people were gathered—and
we weren’t going to ask anyone’s permission.
The normal protocol was that we checked in with the Secret Service agents posted by
the elevator anytime we wanted to leave the residence, whether it was to go downstairs
to watch a movie or to take the dogs out for a walk, but not tonight. Malia and I
just busted past the agents on duty, neither one of us making eye contact. We bypassed
the elevator, moving quickly down a cramped stairwell. I could hear dress shoes clicking
down the stairs behind us, the agents trying to keep up. Malia gave me a devilish
smirk. She wasn’t used to my flouting the rules.
Reaching the State Floor, we made our way toward the tall set of doors leading to
the North Portico, when we heard a voice.
“Hello, ma’am! Can I help you?” It was Claire Faulkner, the usher on night duty. She
was a friendly, soft-spoken brunette who I assumed had been tipped off by the agents
whispering into their wrist pieces behind us.
I looked over my shoulder at her without breaking my stride. “Oh, we’re just going
outside,” I said, “to see the lights.”
Claire’s eyebrows lifted. We paid her no heed. Arriving at the door, I grabbed its
thick golden handle and pulled. But the door wouldn’t budge. Nine months earlier,
an intruder wielding a knife had somehow managed to jump a fence and barge through
this same door, running through the State Floor before being tackled by a Secret Service
officer. In response, security began locking the door.
I turned to the group behind us, which had grown to include a uniformed Secret Service
officer in a white shirt and a black tie. “How do you open this thing?” I said, to
no one in particular. “There’s got to be a key.”
“Ma’am?” Claire said. “I’m not sure that’s the door you want. Every network news camera
is aimed at the north side of the White House right now.”
She did have a point. My hair was a mess and I was in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt.
Not exactly dressed for a public appearance.
“Okay,” I said. “But can’t we get out there without being seen?”
Malia and I were now on a crusade. We weren’t going to relinquish our goal. We were
going to get ourselves outside.
Someone then suggested trying one of the out-of-the-way loading doors on the ground
floor, where trucks came to deliver food and office supplies. Our band began moving
that way. Malia hooked her arm with mine. We were giddy now.
“We’re getting out!” I said.
“Yeah we are!” she said.
We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were
outdoors. The humid summer air hit our faces. I could see fireflies blinking on the
lawn. And there it was, the hum of the public, people whooping and celebrating outside
the iron gates. It had taken us ten minutes to get out of our own home, but we’d done
it. We were outside, standing on a patch of lawn off to one side, out of sight of
the public but with a beautiful, close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride.
Malia and I leaned into each other, happy to have found our way there.
As happens in politics, new winds were already beginning to gather and blow. By the
fall of 2015, the next presidential campaign was in full swing. The Republican side
was crowded, including governors like John Kasich and Chris Christie and senators
like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, plus more than a dozen others. Meanwhile, Democrats
were quickly narrowing themselves toward what would become a choice between Hillary
Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the liberal, longtime independent senator from Vermont.
Donald Trump had announced his candidacy early in the summer, standing inside Trump
Tower in Manhattan and railing on Mexican immigrants—“rapists,” he called them—as
well as the “losers” he said were running the country. I figured he was just grandstanding,
sucking up the media’s attention because he could. Nothing in how he conducted himself
suggested that he was serious about wanting to govern.
I was following the campaign, but not as intently as in years past. Instead, I’d been
busy working on my fourth initiative as First Lady, called Let Girls Learn, which
Barack and I had launched together back in the spring. It was an ambitious, government-wide
effort focused on helping adolescent girls around the world obtain better access to
education. Over the course of nearly seven years now as First Lady, I’d been struck
again and again by both the promise and the vulnerability of young women in our world—from
the immigrant girls I’d met at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School to Malala Yousafzai,
the Pakistani teenager who’d been brutally attacked by the Taliban and who came to
the White House to speak with me, Barack, and Malia about her advocacy on behalf of
girls’ education. I was horrified when, about six months after Malala’s visit, 276
Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram, seemingly intent
on causing other Nigerian families to fear sending their daughters to school. It had
prompted me, for the first and only time during the presidency, to sub for Barack
during his weekly address to the nation, speaking emotionally about how we needed
to work harder at protecting and encouraging girls worldwide.
I felt it all personally. Education had been the primary instrument of change in my
own life, my lever upward in the world. I was appalled that many girls—more than 98
million worldwide, in fact, according to UNESCO statistics—didn’t have access to it.
Some girls weren’t able to attend school because their families needed them to work.
Sometimes the nearest school was far away or too expensive, or the risk of being assaulted
while getting there was too great. In many cases, suffocating gender norms and economic
forces combined to keep girls uneducated—effectively locking them out of future opportunities.
There seemed to be an idea—astonishingly prevalent in certain parts of the world—that
it was simply not worth it to put a girl in school, even as studies consistently showed
that educating girls and women and allowing them to enter the workforce did nothing
but boost a country’s GDP.
Barack and I were committed to changing the perceptions about what made a young woman
valuable to a society. He managed to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in resources
from across his administration, through USAID and the Peace Corps, and also through
the Departments of State, Labor, and Agriculture. The two of us together lobbied other
countries’ governments to help fund programming for girls’ education while encouraging
private companies and think tanks to commit to the cause.
At this point, too, I knew how to make a little noise for a cause. It was natural,
I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway
countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like Stephen Colbert
to lend their star power at events and on social media. I’d enlist the help of Janelle
Monáe, Zendaya, Kelly Clarkson, and other talents to release a catchy pop song written
by Diane Warren called “This Is for My Girls,” the proceeds of which would go toward
funding girls’ education globally.
And lastly, I’d do something that was a little terrifying for me, which was to sing,
making an appearance on the late-night host James Corden’s hilarious “Carpool Karaoke”
series, the two of us circling the South Lawn in a black SUV. We belted out “Signed,
Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” “Single Ladies,” and finally—the reason I’d signed on
to do it in the first place—“This Is for My Girls,” with a guest appearance from Missy
Elliott, who slipped into the backseat and rapped along with us. I’d practiced diligently
for my karaoke session for weeks, memorizing every beat to every song. The goal was
to have it look fun and light, but behind it, as always, was work and a larger purpose—to
keep connecting people with the issue. My segment with James had forty-five million
views on YouTube within the first three months, making every bit of the effort worth
it.
Toward the end of 2015, Barack, the girls, and I flew to Hawaii to spend Christmas
as we always did, renting a big house with wide windows that looked out on the beach,
joined by our usual group of family friends. As we had for the last six years, we
took time on Christmas Day to visit with service members and their families at a nearby
Marine Corps base. And as it had been right through, for Barack the vacation was only
a partial vacation—a just-barely vacation, really. He fielded phone calls, sat for
daily briefings, and was consulting with a skeleton staff of advisers, aides, and
speechwriters who were all staying at a hotel close by. It made me wonder whether
he’d remember how to fully relax when the time actually came, whether either one of
us would find a way to let down when this was all over. What would it feel like, I
wondered, when we finally got to go somewhere without the guy carrying the nuclear
football?
Though I was allowing myself to dream a little, I still couldn’t picture how any of
this would end.
Returning to Washington to begin our final year in the White House, we knew the clock
was ticking now in earnest. I began what would become a long series of “lasts.” There
was the last Governors’ Ball, the last Easter Egg Roll, the last White House Correspondents’
Dinner. Barack and I also made a last state visit to the United Kingdom together,
which included a quick trip to see our friend the Queen.
Barack had always felt a special fondness for Queen Elizabeth, saying that she reminded
him of his no-nonsense grandmother, Toot. I personally was awed by her efficiency,
a skill clearly forged by necessity over a lifetime in the public eye. One day a few
years earlier, Barack and I had stood, hosting a receiving line together with her
and Prince Philip. I’d watched, bemused, as the Queen managed to whisk people speedily
past with economic, friendly hellos that left no room for follow-up conversation,
while Barack projected an amiable looseness, almost inviting chitchat and then ponderously
answering people’s questions, thereby messing up the flow of the line. All these years
after meeting the guy, I was still trying to get him to hurry up.
One afternoon in April 2016, the two of us took a helicopter from the American ambassador’s
residence in London to Windsor Castle in the countryside west of the city. Our advance
team instructed us that the Queen and Prince Philip were planning to meet us when
we landed and then personally drive us back to the castle for lunch. As was always
the case, we were briefed on the protocol ahead of time: We’d greet the royals formally
before getting into their vehicle to make the short drive. I’d sit in the front next
to ninety-four-year-old Prince Philip, who would drive, and Barack would sit next
to the Queen in the backseat.
It would be the first time in more than eight years that the two of us had been driven
by anyone other than a Secret Service agent, or ridden in a car together without agents.
This seemed to matter to our security teams, the same way the protocol mattered to
the advance teams, who fretted endlessly over our movements and interactions, making
sure that every last little thing looked right and went smoothly.
After we’d touched down in a field on the palace grounds and said our hellos, however,
the Queen abruptly threw a wrench into everything by gesturing for me to join her
in the backseat of the Range Rover. I froze, trying to remember if anyone had prepped
me for this scenario, whether it was more polite to go along with it or to insist
that Barack take his proper seat by her side.
The Queen immediately picked up on my hesitation. And was having none of it.
“Did they give you some rule about this?” she said, dismissing all the fuss with a
wave of her hand. “That’s rubbish. Sit wherever you want.”
For me, giving commencement speeches was an important, almost sacred springtime ritual.
Each year I delivered several of them, choosing a mix of high school and college ceremonies,
focusing on the sorts of schools that normally didn’t land high-profile speakers.
(Princeton and Harvard, I’m sorry, but you’re fine without me.) In 2015, I’d gone
back to the South Side of Chicago to speak at the graduation at King College Prep,
the high school from which Hadiya Pendleton would have graduated had she lived long
enough. Her spirit was commemorated at the ceremony by an empty chair, which her classmates
had decorated with sunflowers and purple fabric.
For my final round of commencements as First Lady, I spoke at Jackson State University
in Mississippi, another historically black school, using the opportunity to talk about
striving for excellence. I spoke at the City College of New York, emphasizing the
value of diversity and immigration. And on May 26, which happened to be the day Donald
Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president, I was in New Mexico, speaking
to a class of Native American students who were graduating from a small residential
high school, nearly all of them headed next to college. The deeper I got into the
experience of being First Lady, the more emboldened I felt to speak honestly and directly
about what it meant to be marginalized by race and gender. My intention was to give
younger people a context for the hate surfacing in the news and in political discourse
and to give them a reason to hope.
I tried to communicate the one message about myself and my station in the world that
I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew invisibility. I’d lived
invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility. I liked to mention that I was
the great-great-granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson, who was probably buried
in an unmarked grave somewhere on a South Carolina plantation. And in standing at
a lectern in front of students who were thinking about the future, I offered testament
to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.
The last commencement I attended that spring was personal—Malia’s graduation from
Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June. Our close friend Elizabeth Alexander,
the poet who’d written a poem for Barack’s first inauguration, spoke to the class,
which meant that Barack and I got to sit back and just feel. I was proud of Malia,
who was soon to head off to Europe to travel for a few weeks with friends. After taking
a gap year, she’d enroll at Harvard. I was proud of Sasha, who turned fifteen that
same day and was counting down the hours to the Beyoncé concert she was going to in
lieu of a birthday party. She would go on to spend much of the summer on Martha’s
Vineyard, living with family friends until Barack and I arrived for vacation. She’d
make new friends and land her first job, working at a snack bar. I was proud, too,
of my mother, who sat nearby in the sunshine, wearing a black dress and heels, having
managed to live in the White House and travel the world with us while staying utterly
and completely herself.
I was proud of all of us, for almost being done.
Barack sat next to me in a folding chair. I could see the tears brimming behind his
sunglasses as he watched Malia cross the stage to pick up her diploma. He was tired,
I knew. Three days earlier, he’d given a eulogy for a friend from law school who’d
worked for him in the White House. Two days later, an extremist would open fire inside
a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three
more. The gravity of his job never let up.
He was a good father, dialed in and consistent in ways his own father had never been,
but there were also things he’d sacrificed along the way. He’d entered into parenthood
as a politician. His constituents and their needs had been with us all along.
It had to hurt a little bit, realizing he was so close to having more freedom and
more time, just as our daughters were beginning to step away.
But we had to let them go. The future was theirs, just as it should be.
In late July, I flew through a violent thunderstorm, the plane dipping and diving
on its approach to Philadelphia, where I was going to speak for the last time at a
Democratic convention. It was perhaps the worst turbulence I’d ever experienced, and
while Caroline Adler Morales, my very pregnant communications director, worried that
the stress of it would put her into labor and Melissa—a skittish flier under normal
circumstances—sat shrieking in her seat, all I could think was Just get me down in time to practice my speech. Though I’d long grown comfortable on the biggest stages, I still found huge comfort
in preparation.
Back in 2008, during Barack’s first run for president, I’d rehearsed and re-rehearsed
my convention speech until I could place the commas in my sleep, in part because I’d
never given a speech on live television like that, and also because the personal stakes
felt so high. I was stepping onto the stage after having been demonized as an angry
black woman who didn’t love her country. My speech that night gave me a chance to
humanize myself, explaining who I was in my own voice, slaying the caricatures and
stereotypes with my own words. Four years later, at the convention in Charlotte, North
Carolina, I’d spoken earnestly about what I’d seen in Barack during his first term—how
he was still the same principled man I’d married, how I’d realized that “being president
doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.”
This time, I was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Barack’s opponent in the brutal 2008
primary who’d gone on to become his loyal and effective secretary of state. I’d never
feel as passionately about another candidate as I did about my own husband, which
made campaigning for others sometimes difficult for me. I maintained a code for myself,
though, when it came to speaking publicly about anything or anyone in the political
sphere: I said only what I absolutely believed and what I absolutely felt.
We landed in Philadelphia and I rushed to the convention center, finding just enough
time to change clothes and run through my speech twice. Then I stepped out and spoke
my truth. I talked about the fears I’d had early on about raising our daughters in
the White House and how proud I was of the intelligent young women they’d become.
I said that I trusted Hillary because she understood the demands of the presidency
and had the temperament to lead, because she was as qualified as any nominee in history.
And I acknowledged the stark choice now being put before the country.
Since childhood, I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies while
also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully,
a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners
of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance.
I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they
heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that
we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that
as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going
back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always
the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every
single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that
night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump
in an unguarded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women,
using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how
to quote it without violating the established standards of decency. In the end, the
standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s
voice.
When I heard it, I could hardly believe it. And then again, there was something painfully
familiar in the menace and male jocularity of that tape. I can hurt you and get away with it. It was an expression of hatred that had generally been kept out of polite company,
but still lived in the marrow of our supposedly enlightened society—alive and accepted
enough that someone like Donald Trump could afford to be cavalier about it. Every
woman I know recognized it. Every person who’s ever been made to feel “other” recognized
it. It was precisely what so many of us hoped our own children would never need to
experience, and yet probably would. Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of
dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
My body buzzed with fury after hearing that tape. I was scheduled to speak at a campaign
rally for Hillary the following week, and rather than delivering a straightforward
endorsement of her capabilities, I felt compelled to try to address Trump’s words
directly—to counter his voice with my own.
I worked on my remarks while sitting in a hospital room at Walter Reed, where my mother
was having back surgery, my thoughts flowing fast. I’d been mocked and threatened
many times now, cut down for being black, female, and vocal. I’d felt the derision
directed at my body, the literal space I occupied in the world. I’d watched Donald
Trump stalk Hillary Clinton during a debate, following her around as she spoke, standing
too close, trying to diminish her presence with his. I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities—in the form of catcalls, groping,
assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts
are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that
never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school
and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we
try to advance.
For me, Trump’s comments were another blow. I couldn’t let his message stand. Working
with Sarah Hurwitz, the deft speechwriter who’d been with me since 2008, I channeled
my fury into words, and then—after my mother had recovered from surgery—I delivered
them one October day in Manchester, New Hampshire. Speaking to a high-energy crowd,
I made my feelings clear. “This is not normal,” I said. “This is not politics as usual.
This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.” I articulated my rage and my fear, along
with my faith that with this election Americans understood the true nature of what
they were choosing between. I put my whole heart into giving that speech.
I then flew back to Washington, praying I’d been heard.
As fall continued, Barack and I began making plans for our move to a new house in
January, having decided to stay in Washington so that Sasha could finish high school
at Sidwell. Malia, meanwhile, was in South America on a gap-year adventure, feeling
the freedom of being as far away from the political intensity as she could. I implored
my staff in the East Wing to finish strong, even as they needed to think about finding
new jobs, even as the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump grew more intense
and distracting by the day.
On November 7, 2016, the evening before the election, Barack and I made a quick trip
to Philadelphia to join Hillary and her family at a final rally before an enormous
crowd on Independence Mall. The mood was positive, expectant. I took heart in the
optimism Hillary projected that night, and in the many polls that showed her with
a comfortable lead. I took heart in what I thought I understood about the qualities
Americans would and wouldn’t tolerate in a leader. I presumed nothing, but I felt
good about the odds.
For the first time in many years, Barack and I had no role to play on election night.
There was no hotel suite reserved for the wait; there were no trays of canapés laid
out, no television blaring from any corner. There was no hair, makeup, or wardrobe
to be tended to, no marshaling of our children, no late-night speech being prepped
for delivery. We had nothing to do, and it thrilled us. This was the beginning of
our stepping back, a first taste of what the future might be like. We were invested,
of course, but the moment ahead wasn’t ours. It was merely ours to witness. Knowing
it would be a while before results came in, we invited Valerie over to watch a movie
in the White House theater.
I can’t remember a thing about the film that night—not its title, not even its genre.
Really, we were just passing time in the dark. My mind kept turning over the reality
that Barack’s term as president was almost finished. What lay ahead most immediately
were good-byes—dozens and dozens of them, all emotional, as the staff we loved and
appreciated so much would begin to rotate out of the White House. Our goal was to
do what George and Laura Bush had done for us, making the transition of power as smooth
as possible. Already, our teams were beginning to prepare briefing books and contact
lists for their successors. Before they left, many East Wing staffers would leave
handwritten notes on their desks, giving a friendly welcome and a standing offer of
help to the next person coming along.
We were still immersed in the business of every day, but we’d also started to plan
in earnest for what lay ahead. Barack and I were excited to stay in Washington but
would build a legacy on the South Side of Chicago, which would become home to the
Obama Presidential Center. We planned to launch a foundation as well, one whose mission
would be to encourage and embolden a new generation of leaders. The two of us had
many goals for the future, but the biggest involved creating more space and support
for young people and their ideas. I also knew that we needed a break: I’d started
scouting for a private place where we could go to decompress for a few days in January,
immediately after the new president got sworn in.
We just needed the new president.
As the movie wrapped up and the lights came on, Barack’s cell phone buzzed. I saw
him glance at it and then look again, his brow furrowing just slightly.
“Huh,” he said. “Results in Florida are looking kind of strange.”
There was no alarm in his voice, just a tiny seed of awareness, a hot ember glowing
suddenly in the grass. The phone buzzed again. My heart started to tick faster. I
knew the updates were coming from David Simas, Barack’s political adviser, who was
monitoring returns from the West Wing and who understood the precise county-by-county
algebra of the electoral map. If something cataclysmic was going to happen, Simas
would spot it early.
I watched my husband’s face closely, not sure I was ready to hear what he was going
to say. Whatever it was, it didn’t look good. I felt something leaden take hold in
my stomach just then, my anxiety hardening into dread. As Barack and Valerie started
to discuss the early results, I announced that I was going upstairs. I walked to the
elevator, hoping to do only one thing, which was to block it all out and go to sleep.
I understood what was probably happening, but I wasn’t ready to face it.
As I slept, the news was confirmed: American voters had elected Donald Trump to succeed
Barack as the next president of the United States.
I wanted to not know that fact for as long as I possibly could.
The next day, I woke to a wet and dreary morning. A gray sky hung over Washington.
I couldn’t help but interpret it as funereal. Time seemed to crawl. Sasha went off
to school, quietly working through her disbelief. Malia called from Bolivia, sounding
deeply rattled. I told both our girls that I loved them and that things would be okay.
I kept trying to tell myself the same thing.
In the end, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than her opponent,
but Trump had captured the Electoral College thanks to fewer than eighty thousand
votes spread across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I am not a political person,
so I’m not going to attempt to offer an analysis of the results. I won’t try to speculate
about who was responsible or what was unfair. I just wish more people had turned out
to vote. And I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to
reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist
as their president. But the result was now ours to live with.
Barack had stayed up most of the night tracking the data, and as had happened so many
times before, he was called upon to step forward as a symbol of steadiness to help
the nation process its shock. I didn’t envy him the task. He gave a morning pep talk
to his staff in the Oval Office and then, around noon, delivered a set of sober but
reassuring remarks to the nation from the Rose Garden, calling—as he always did—for
unity and dignity, asking Americans to respect one another as well as the institutions
built by our democracy.
That afternoon, I sat in my East Wing office with my entire staff, all of us crammed
into the room on couches and desk chairs that had been pulled in from other rooms.
My team was made up largely of women and minorities, including several who came from
immigrant families. Many were in tears, feeling that their every vulnerability was
now exposed. They’d poured themselves into their jobs because they believed thoroughly
in the causes they were furthering. I tried to tell them at every turn that they should
be proud of who they are, that their work mattered, and that one election couldn’t
wipe away eight years of change.
Everything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what
I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality—the world as it is. We needed
now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.
We were at the end now, truly. I found myself caught between looking back and looking
forward, mulling over one question in particular: What lasts?
We were the forty-fourth First Family and only the eleventh family to spend two full
terms in the White House. We were, and would always be, the first black one. I hoped
that when future parents brought their children to visit, the way I’d brought Malia
and Sasha when their father was a senator, they’d be able to point out some reminder
of our family’s time here. I thought it was important to register our presence within
the larger history of the place.
Not every president commissioned an official china setting, for instance, but I made
sure we did. During Barack’s second term, we also chose to redecorate the Old Family
Dining Room, situated just off the State Dining Room, freshening it up with a modern
look and opening it to the public for the first time. On the room’s north wall, we’d
hung a stunning yellow, red, and blue abstract painting by Alma Thomas—Resurrection—which became the first work of art by a black woman to be added to the White House’s
permanent collection.
The most enduring mark, however, lay outside the walls. The garden had persisted through
seven and a half years now, producing roughly two thousand pounds of food annually.
It had survived heavy snows, sheets of rain, and damaging hail. When high winds had
toppled the forty-two-foot-high National Christmas Tree a few years earlier, the garden
had survived intact. Before I left the White House, I wanted to give it even more
permanence. We expanded its footprint to twenty-eight hundred square feet, more than
double its original size. We added stone pathways and wooden benches, plus a welcoming
arbor made of wood sourced from the estates of Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe and the childhood home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And then, one fall afternoon,
I set out across the South Lawn to officially dedicate the garden for posterity.
Joining me that day were supporters and advocates who’d helped with our nutrition
and childhood health efforts over the years, as well as a pair of students from the
original class of fifth graders at Bancroft Elementary School, who were now practically
adults. Most of my staff was there, including Sam Kass, who’d left the White House
in 2014 but had returned for the occasion.
Looking out at the crowd in the garden, I was emotional. I felt gratitude for all
the people on my team who’d given everything to the work, sorting through handwritten
letters, fact-checking my speeches, hopping cross-country flights to prepare for our
events. I’d seen many of them take on more responsibility and blossom both professionally
and personally, even under the glare of the harshest lights. The burdens of being
“the first” didn’t fall only on our family’s shoulders. For eight years, these optimistic
young people—and a few seasoned professionals—had had our backs. Melissa, who had
been my very first campaign hire nearly a decade ago and someone I will count on as
a close friend for life, remained with me in the East Wing through the end of the
term, as did Tina, my remarkable chief of staff. Kristen Jarvis had been replaced
by Chynna Clayton, a hardworking young woman from Miami who quickly became another
big sister to our girls and was central to keeping my life running smoothly.
I considered all these people, current and former staff, to be family. And I was so
proud of what we’d done.
For every video that swiftly saturated the internet—I’d mom-danced with Jimmy Fallon,
Nerf-dunked on LeBron James, and college-rapped with Jay Pharoah—we’d focused ourselves
on doing more than trending for a few hours on Twitter. And we had results. Forty-five
million kids were eating healthier breakfasts and lunches; eleven million students
were getting sixty minutes of physical activity every day through our Let’s Move!
Active Schools program. Children overall were eating more whole grains and produce.
The era of supersized fast food was coming to a close.
Through my work with Jill Biden on Joining Forces, we’d helped persuade businesses
to hire or train more than 1.5 million veterans and military spouses. Following through
on one of the very first concerns I’d heard on the campaign trail, we’d gotten all
fifty states to collaborate on professional licensing agreements, which would help
keep military spouses’ careers from stalling every time they moved.
On education, Barack and I had leveraged billions of dollars to help girls around
the world get the schooling they deserve. More than twenty-eight hundred Peace Corps
volunteers were now trained to implement programs for girls internationally. And in
the United States, my team and I had helped more young people sign up for federal
student aid, supported school counselors, and elevated College Signing Day to a national
level.
Barack, meanwhile, had managed to reverse the most serious economic crisis since the
Great Depression. He’d helped to broker the Paris Agreement on climate change, brought
tens of thousands of troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and led the effort to
effectively shut down Iran’s nuclear program. Twenty million more people had the security
of health insurance. And we’d managed two terms in office without a major scandal.
We had held ourselves and the people who worked with us to the highest standards of
ethics and decency, and we’d made it all the way through.
For us, some changes were harder to measure but felt just as important. Six months
before the garden dedication, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young composer I’d met at one
of our first arts events, returned to the White House. His hip-hop riff on Alexander
Hamilton had exploded into a Broadway sensation, and with it he’d become a global
superstar. Hamilton was a musical celebration of America’s history and diversity, recasting our understanding
of the roles minorities play in our national story, highlighting the importance of
women who’d long been overshadowed by powerful men. I’d seen it off-Broadway and loved
it so much that I went to see it again when it hit the big stage. It was catchy and
funny, heart swelling and heartbreaking—the best piece of art in any form that I’d
ever encountered.
Lin-Manuel brought most of his cast along with him to Washington, a talented multiracial
ensemble. The performers spent their afternoon with young people who’d come from local
high schools—budding playwrights, dancers, and rappers kicking around the White House,
writing lyrics and dropping beats with their heroes. In the late afternoon, we all
came together for a performance in the East Room. Barack and I sat in the front row,
surrounded by young people of all different races and backgrounds, the two of us awash
in emotion as Christopher Jackson and Lin-Manuel sang the ballad “One Last Time” as
their final number. Here were two artists, one black and one Puerto Rican, standing
beneath a 115-year-old chandelier, bracketed by towering antique portraits of George
and Martha Washington, singing about feeling “at home in this nation we’ve made.”
The power and truth of that moment stays with me to this day.
Hamilton touched me because it reflected the kind of history I’d lived myself. It told a story
about America that allowed the diversity in. I thought about this afterward: So many
of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our
whole truth doesn’t live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that
tell us that there’s only one way to be American—that if our skin is dark or our hips
are wide, if we don’t experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language
or come from another country, then we don’t belong. That is, until someone dares to
start telling that story differently.
I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail
neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in
a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything.
It depends on which way you want to tell it.
As we moved toward the end of Barack’s presidency, I thought about America this same
way. I loved my country for all the ways its story could be told. For almost a decade,
I’d been privileged to move through it, experiencing its bracing contradictions and
bitter conflicts, its pain and persistent idealism, and above all else its resilience.
My view was unusual, perhaps, but I think what I experienced during those years is
what many did—a sense of progress, the comfort of compassion, the joy of watching
the unsung and invisible find some light. A glimmer of the world as it could be. This
was our bid for permanence: a rising generation that understood what was possible—and
that even more was possible for them. Whatever was coming next, this was a story we
could own.
11
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a
hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth.
Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look
at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground
full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.
The day after my father died, we drove to a South Side funeral parlor—me, my mother,
and Craig—to pick out a casket and plan a service. To make arrangements, as they say in funeral parlors. I don’t remember much about our visit there, except
for how stunned we were, each of us bricked inside our private grief. Still, as we
went through the obscene ritual of shopping for the right box in which to bury our
dad, Craig and I managed to have our first and only fight as adult siblings.
It boiled down to this: I wanted to buy the fanciest, most expensive casket in the
place, complete with every extra handle and cushion a casket could possibly have.
I had no particular rationale for wanting this. It was something to do when there
was nothing else to do. The practical, pragmatic part of our upbringing wouldn’t allow
me to put much stock in the gentle, well-intentioned platitudes people would heap
on us a few days later at the funeral. I couldn’t be easily comforted by the suggestion
that my dad had gone to a better place or was sitting with angels. As I saw it, he
just deserved a nice casket.
Craig, meanwhile, insisted that Dad would want something basic—modest and practical
and nothing more. It suited our father’s personality, he said. Anything else would
be too showy.
We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director pretended not
to listen and our mother just stared at us implacably, through the fog of her own
pain.
We were yelling for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual argument. Neither
of us was invested in the outcome. In the end, we’d bury our dad in a compromise casket—nothing
too fancy, nothing too plain—and never once discuss it again. We were having an absurd
and inappropriate argument because in the wake of death every single thing on earth
feels absurd and inappropriate.
Later, we drove Mom back to Euclid Avenue. The three of us sat downstairs at the kitchen
table, spent and sullen now, our misery provoked all over again by the sight of the
fourth empty chair. Soon, we were weeping. We sat for what felt like a long time,
blubbering until we were exhausted and out of tears. My mother, who hadn’t said much
all day, finally offered a comment.
“Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully.
And yet there was a touch of lightness in how she said it. She was pointing out that
we Robinsons had been reduced to a true and ridiculous mess—unrecognizable with our
swollen eyelids and dripping noses, our hurt and strange helplessness here in our
own kitchen. Who were we? Didn’t we know? Hadn’t he shown us? She was calling us back
from our loneliness with three blunt words, as only our mom could do.
Mom looked at me and I looked at Craig, and suddenly the moment seemed a little funny.
The first chuckle, we knew, would normally have come from that empty chair. Slowly,
we started to titter and crack up, collapsing finally into full-blown fits of laughter.
I realize that might seem strange, but we were so much better at this than we were
at crying. The point was he would have liked it, and so we let ourselves laugh.
Losing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and ponder
how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he died. Suzanne had been
twenty-six. The lesson there was simple: Life is short and not to be wasted. If I
died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written
or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something
more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.
Still unsure of where I hoped to land, I typed up letters of introduction and sent
them to people all over the city of Chicago. I wrote to the heads of foundations,
community-oriented nonprofits, and big universities in town, reaching out specifically
to their legal departments—not because I wanted to do legal work, but because I figured
they were more likely to respond to my résumé. Thankfully, a number of people did
respond, inviting me to have lunch or come in for a meeting, even if they had no job
to offer. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1991, I put myself in front
of anyone I thought might be able to give me advice. The point was less to find a
new job than to widen my understanding of what was possible and how others had gone
about it. I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simply unfold
on its own, that my fancy academic degrees weren’t going to automatically lead me
to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job wouldn’t just come from perusing
the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required deeper thought and effort. I
would need to hustle and learn. And so, again and again, I laid out my professional
dilemma for the people I met, quizzing them on what they did and whom they knew. I
asked earnest questions about what kind of work might be available to a lawyer who
didn’t, in fact, want to practice law.
One afternoon, I visited the office of a friendly, thoughtful man named Art Sussman,
who was the in-house legal counsel for the University of Chicago. It turned out that
my mother had once spent about a year working for him as a secretary, taking dictation
and maintaining the legal department’s files. This was back when I was a sophomore
in high school, before she’d taken her job at the bank. Art was surprised to learn
that I hadn’t ever visited her at work—that I’d never actually set foot on the university’s
pristine Gothic campus before now, despite having grown up just a few miles away.
If I was honest, there’d been no reason for me to visit the campus. My neighborhood
school didn’t run field trips there. If there were cultural events open to the community
when I was a kid, my family hadn’t known about them. We had no friends—no acquaintances,
even—who were students or alumni. The University of Chicago was an elite school, and
to most everyone I knew growing up, elite meant not for us. Its gray stone buildings almost literally had their backs turned to the streets surrounding
campus. Driving past, my dad used to roll his eyes at the flocks of students haplessly
jaywalking across Ellis Avenue, wondering how it was that such smart people had never
learned to properly cross a street.
Like many South Siders, my family maintained what was an admittedly dim and limited
view of the university, even if my mom had passed a year happily working there. When
it came time for me and Craig to think about college, we didn’t even consider applying
to the University of Chicago. Princeton, for some strange reason, had struck us as
more accessible.
Hearing all this, Art was incredulous. “You’ve really never been here?” he said. “Never?”
“Nope, not once.”
There was an odd power in saying it out loud. I hadn’t given the idea much thought
before now, but it occurred to me that I’d have made a perfectly fine University of
Chicago student, if only the town-gown divide hadn’t been so vast—if I’d known about
the school and the school had known about me. Thinking about this, I felt an internal
prick, a small subterranean twinge of purpose. The combination of where I came from
and what I’d made of myself gave me a certain, possibly meaningful perspective. Being
black and from the South Side, I suddenly saw, helped me recognize problems that a
man like Art Sussman didn’t even realize existed.
In several years, I’d get my chance to work for the university and reckon with some
of these community-relations problems directly, but right now Art was just kindly
offering to pass around my résumé.
“I think you should talk to Susan Sher,” he told me then, unwittingly setting off
what to this day feels like an inspired chain reaction. Susan was about fifteen years
older than I was. She’d been a partner at a big law firm but had ultimately bailed
out of the corporate world, just as I was hoping to do, though she was still practicing
law with the Chicago city government. Susan had slate-gray eyes, the kind of fair
skin that belongs on a Victorian queen, and a laugh that often ended with a mischievous
snort. She was gently confident and highly accomplished and would become a lifelong
friend. “I’d hire you right now,” she told me when we finally met. “But you just finished
telling me how you don’t want to be a lawyer.”
Instead, Susan proposed what now seems like another fated introduction, steering me
and my résumé toward a new colleague of hers at city hall—another ship-jumping corporate
lawyer with a yen for public service, this one a fellow daughter of the South Side
and someone who would end up altering my course in life, not once, but repeatedly.
“The person you really need to meet,” Susan said, “is Valerie Jarrett.”
Valerie Jarrett was the newly appointed deputy chief of staff to the mayor of Chicago
and had deep connections across the city’s African American community. Like Susan,
she’d been smart enough to land herself a job in a blue-chip firm after law school
and had then been self-aware enough to realize that she wanted out. She’d moved to
city hall largely because she was inspired by Harold Washington, who’d been elected
mayor in 1983 when I was away at college and was the first African American to hold
the office. Washington was a voluble politician with an exuberant spirit. My parents
loved him for how he could pepper an otherwise folksy speech with Shakespeare quotes
and for the famous, mouth-stuffing vigor with which he ate fried chicken at community
events on the South Side. Most important, he had a distaste for the entrenched Democratic
machinery that had long governed Chicago, awarding lucrative city contracts to political
donors and generally keeping blacks in service to the party but rarely allowing them
to advance into official elected roles.
Building his campaign around reforming the city’s political system and better tending
to its neglected neighborhoods, Washington won the election by a hair. His style was
brassy and his temperament was bold. He was able to eviscerate opponents with his
eloquence and intellect. He was a black, brainy superhero. He clashed regularly and
fearlessly with the mostly white old-guard members of the city council and was viewed
as something of a walking legend, especially among the city’s black citizens, who
saw his leadership as kindling a larger spirit of progressivism. His vision had been
an early inspiration for Barack, who arrived in Chicago to work as an organizer in
1985.
Valerie, too, was drawn by Washington. She was thirty years old when she joined Washington’s
staff in 1987, at the start of his second term. She was also the mother of a young
daughter and soon to be divorced, which made it a deeply inconvenient time to take
the sort of pay cut one does when leaving a swishy law firm and landing in city government.
And within months of her starting the job, tragedy struck: Harold Washington abruptly
had a heart attack and died at his desk, thirty minutes after holding a press conference
about low-income housing. In the aftermath, a black alderman was appointed by the
city council to take Washington’s place, but his tenure was relatively short. In a
move many African Americans saw as a swift and demoralizing return to the old white
ways of Chicago politics, voters went on to elect Richard M. Daley, the son of a previous
mayor, Richard J. Daley, who was broadly considered the godfather of Chicago’s famous
cronyism.
Though she had reservations about the new administration, Valerie had decided to stay
on at city hall, moving out of the legal department and directly into Mayor Daley’s
office. She was glad to be there, as much for the contrast as anything. She described
to me how her transition from corporate law into government felt like a relief, an
energizing leap out of the super-groomed unreality of high-class law being practiced
on the top floors of skyscrapers and into the real world—the very real world.
Chicago’s City Hall and County Building is a flat-roofed, eleven-story, gray-granite
monolith that occupies an entire block between Clark and LaSalle north of the Loop.
Compared with the soaring office towers surrounding it, it’s squatty but not without
grandeur, featuring tall Corinthian columns out front and giant, echoing lobbies made
primarily of marble. The county runs its business out of the east-facing half of the
building; the city uses the western half, which houses the mayor and city council
members as well as the city clerk. City hall, as I learned on the sweltering summer
day I showed up to meet Valerie for a job interview, was both alarmingly and upliftingly
packed with people.
There were couples getting married and people registering cars. There were people
lodging complaints about potholes, their landlords, their sewer lines, and everything
else they felt the city could improve. There were babies in strollers and old ladies
in wheelchairs. There were journalists and lobbyists, and also homeless people just
looking to get out of the heat. Out on the sidewalk in front of the building, a knot
of activists waved signs and shouted chants, though I can’t remember what it was they
were angry about. What I do know is that I was simultaneously taken aback and completely
enthralled by the clunky, controlled chaos of the place. City hall belonged to the
people. It had a noisy, gritty immediacy that I never felt at Sidley.
Valerie had reserved twenty minutes on her schedule to talk to me that day, but our
conversation ended up stretching for an hour and a half. A thin, light-skinned African
American woman dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, she was soft-spoken and strikingly
serene, with a steady brown-eyed gaze and an impressive grasp of how the city functioned.
She enjoyed her job but didn’t try to gloss over the bureaucratic headaches of government
work. Something about her caused me instantly to relax. Years later, Valerie would
tell me that to her surprise I’d managed to reverse the standard interview process
on her that day—that I’d given her some basic, helpful information about myself, but
otherwise I’d grilled her, wanting to understand every last feeling she had about
the work she did and how responsive the mayor was to his employees. I was testing
the suitability of the work for me as much as she was testing the suitability of me
for the work.
Looking back on it, I’m sure I was only capitalizing on what felt like a rare opportunity
to speak with a woman whose background mirrored mine but who was a few years ahead
of me in her career trajectory. Valerie was calm, bold, and wise in ways that few
people I’d met before were. She was someone to learn from, to stick close to. I saw
this right away.
Before I left, she offered me a job, inviting me to join her staff as an assistant
to Mayor Daley, beginning as soon as I was ready. I would no longer be practicing
law. My salary would be $60,000, about half of what I was currently making at Sidley
& Austin. She told me I should take some time and think about whether I was truly
prepared to make this sort of change. It was my leap to consider, my leap to make.
I had never been one to hold city hall in high regard. Having grown up black and on
the South Side, I had little faith in politics. Politics had traditionally been used
against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded, leaving us undereducated,
unemployed, and underpaid. I had grandparents who’d lived through the horror of Jim
Crow laws and the humiliation of housing discrimination and basically mistrusted authority
of any sort. (Southside, as you may recall, thought that even the dentist was out
to get him.) My father, who was a city employee most of his life, had essentially
been conscripted into service as a Democratic precinct captain in order to even be
considered for promotions at his job. He relished the social aspect of his precinct
duties but had always been put off by city hall cronyism.
And yet I was suddenly considering a city hall job. I’d winced at the pay cut, but
on some visceral level I was just intrigued. I was feeling another twinge, a quiet
nudge toward what might be a whole different future from the one I’d planned for.
I was almost ready to leap, but for one thing. It wasn’t just about me anymore. When
Valerie called me a few days later to follow up, I told her I was still thinking the
offer over. I then asked a final and probably strange question. “Could I please,”
I said, “also introduce you to my fiancé?”
I suppose I should back up here, rewinding us through the heavy heat of that summer,
through the disorienting haze of those long months after my father died. Barack had
flown back to Chicago to be with me for as long as he could around my dad’s funeral
before returning to finish at Harvard. After graduation in late May, he packed up
his things, sold his banana-yellow Datsun, and flew back to Chicago, delivering himself
to 7436 South Euclid Avenue and into my arms. I loved him. I felt loved by him. We’d
made it almost two years as a long-distance couple, and now, finally, we could be
a short-distance couple. It meant that we once again had weekend hours to linger in
bed, to read the newspaper and go out for brunch and share every thought we had. We
could have Monday night dinners and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night dinners,
too. We could shop for groceries and fold laundry in front of the TV. On the many
evenings when I still got weepy over the loss of my dad, Barack was now there to curl
himself around me and kiss the top of my head.
Barack was relieved to be done with law school, eager to get out of the abstract realm
of academia and into work that felt more engaging and real. He’d also sold his idea
for a nonfiction book about race and identity to a New York publisher, which for someone
who worshipped books as he did felt like an enormous and humbling boon. He’d been
given an advance and had about a year to complete the manuscript.
Barack had, as he always seemed to, plenty of options. His reputation—the gushing
reports by his law school professors, the New York Times story about his selection as president of the Law Review—seemed to bring a flood of opportunity. The University of Chicago offered him an
unpaid fellowship that came with a small office for the year, the idea being that
he’d write his book there and maybe eventually sign on to teach as an adjunct professor
at the law school. My colleagues at Sidley & Austin, still hoping Barack would come
work full-time at the firm, provided him with a desk to use during the eight or so
weeks leading up to his bar exam in July. He was now also considering taking a job
at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small public interest firm that did civil rights
and fair housing work and whose attorneys had been aligned closely with Harold Washington,
which was a huge draw for Barack.
There’s something innately bolstering about a person who sees his opportunities as
endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy questioning whether they will ever dry up.
Barack had worked hard and dutifully for everything he was now being given, but he
wasn’t notching achievements or measuring his progress against that of others, as
so many people I knew did—as I sometimes did myself. He seemed, at times, beautifully
oblivious to the giant rat race of life and all the material things a thirtysomething
lawyer was supposed to be going after, from a car that wasn’t embarrassing to a house
with a yard in the suburbs or a swank condo in the Loop. I’d observed this quality
in him before, but now that we were living together and I was considering making the
first real swerve of my life, I came to value it even more.
In a nutshell, Barack believed and trusted when others did not. He had a simple, buoying
faith that if you stuck to your p